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In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, questions persisted about how the potential cataclysm had been allowed to develop. A subsequent congressional investigation focused on what came to be known as the “photo gap”: five weeks during which intelligence-gathering flights over Cuba had been attenuated. ?In Blind over Cuba, David M. Barrett and Max Holland challenge the popular perception of the Kennedy administration’s handling of the Soviet Union’s surreptitious deployment of missiles in the Western Hemisphere. Rather than epitomizing it as a masterpiece of crisis management by policy makers and the administration, Barrett and Holland make the case that the affair was, in fact, a close call stemming directly from decisions made in a climate of deep distrust between key administration officials and the intelligence community. ?Because of White House and State Department fears of “another U-2 incident” (the infamous 1960 Soviet downing of an American U-2 spy plane), the CIA was not permitted to send surveillance aircraft on prolonged flights over Cuban airspace for many weeks, from late August through early October. Events proved that this was precisely the time when the Soviets were secretly deploying missiles in Cuba. When Director of Central Intelligence John McCone forcefully pointed out that this decision had led to a dangerous void in intelligence collection, the president authorized one U-2 flight directly over western Cuba—thereby averting disaster, as the surveillance detected the Soviet missiles shortly before they became operational.? The Kennedy administration recognized that their failure to gather intelligence was politically explosive, and their subsequent efforts to influence the perception of events form the focus for this study. Using recently declassified documents, secondary materials, and interviews with several key participants, Barrett and Holland weave a story of intra-agency conflict, suspicion, and discord that undermined intelligence-gathering, adversely affected internal postmortems conducted after the crisis peaked, and resulted in keeping Congress and the public in the dark about what really happened.? Fifty years after the crisis that brought the superpowers to the brink, Blind over Cuba: The Photo Gap and the Missile Crisis offers a new chapter in our understanding of that pivotal event, the tensions inside the US government during the cold war, and the obstacles Congress faces when conducting an investigation of the executive branch.

In an original assessment of all three branches, Jasmine Farrier reveals a new way in which the American federal system is broken. Turning away from the partisan narratives of everyday politics,Constitutional Dysfunction on Trial diagnoses the deeper and bipartisan nature of imbalance of power that undermines public deliberation and accountability, especially on war powers. By focusing on the lawsuits brought by Congressional members that challenge presidential unilateralism, Farrier provides a new diagnostic lens on the permanent institutional problems that have undermined the separation of powers system in the last five decades, across a diverse array of partisan and policy landscapes. As each chapter demonstrates, member lawsuits are an outlet for frustrated members of both parties who cannot get their House and Senate colleagues to confront overweening presidential action through normal legislative processes. But these lawsuits often backfire - leaving Congress as an institution even more disadvantaged. Jasmine Farrier argues these suits are more symptoms of constitutional dysfunction than the cure.Constitutional Dysfunction on Trial shows federal judges will not and cannot restore the separation of powers system alone. Fifty years of congressional atrophy cannot be reversed in court.

During his first term in office, Pres. George W. Bush made reference to the \"unitary executive\" ninety-five times, as part of signing statements, proclamations, and executive orders. Pres. Barack Obama's actions continue to make issues of executive power as timely as ever. Unitary executive theory stems from interpretation of the constitutional assertion that the president is vested with the \"executive power\" of the United States. In this groundbreaking collection of studies, eleven presidential scholars examine for the first time the origins, development, use, and future of this theory.

In this highly provocative volume, Mickey Edwards argues that conservatives today have abandoned their principles and have become champions of that which they once most feared. The conservative movement was based on a distinctly American kind of conservatism which drew its inspiration directly from the United States Constitution--in particular, an overriding belief in individual liberty and limited government. But today, Edwards argues, the mantle of conservatism has been seized by a group that threatens the health of the entire federal system. Edward concludes with a blueprint for reclaiming conservatism.

In September 2003, seven former heads of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs gathered for the first time ever to compare their experiences working for every president from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton. For two days, these congressional liaisons, charged with moving their respective presidents’ legislative agendas through an independent—and sometimes hostile—Congress, shared first-hand views of the intricacies of presidential-congressional relations: how it works, how it doesn’t work, and the fascinating interplay of personalities, events, and politics that happens along the way.

The Iraq War of March 19, 2003 was an implausible war at the outset. We now understand that it could have been averted and never should have been waged. How and why did it begin? Who was responsible? This book offers a new perspective on the Iraq War and explains the dynamic relationships between the George W. Bush administration, the United States Congress, and the national news media. It is based on the “multiple streams model of political change” by John Kingdon, which says that if a unique combination of political, policy, and problem streams collide, under the right circumstances, they can create a window of opportunity for a shift in policy. It was the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which set the stage for the emergence of three dynamic streams in the country. Fear, power, and a contentious political climate converged to produce not only a dramatic new foreign policy, but also a war with Iraq, a country which had not provoked or threatened the United States. Fear, power, and a tense political climate also influenced institutional behavior and exposed the failures of 1) The executive branch in the administration of George W. Bush, 2) The United States Congress and, 3) the national news media. All are designed and are differently responsible to protect the interests of the American people. Errors in judgment have happened throughout history with other administrations, with other Congresses, and with the news media. However, with regard to the Iraq War, it was a matter of degree and extent, especially for the President of the United States. Both the Congress and the news media were also experiencing colossal institutional changes, which influenced and hindered their performances. However, all were culpable in helping to create the Iraq war, which today stands as one of the longest military conflicts in United States history.

Barack Obama entered office on a wave of popular expectation; will he exit at the hands of a Tea Party inspired populist tsunami or return for four more years? Obama in Office brings together well-established political scientists and journalists to offer the first detailed assessment of President Obama and his first two years in office. This book covers the range of policy tests which the administration has faced during this period, including the recession and its jobless recovery, health care reform, financial regulation, the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, and the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Looking beyond the midterms, Obama in Office considers the results of 2010, the impact of the Tea Party, and the prospects for 2012.

Arguments based on historical practice are a mainstay of debates about the constitutional separation of powers. Surprisingly, however, there has been little sustained academic attention to the proper role of historical practice in this context. The scant existing scholarship is either limited to specific subject areas or focused primarily on judicial doctrine without addressing the use of historical practice in broader conceptual or theoretical terms. To the extent that the issue has been discussed, accounts of how historical practice should inform the separation of powers often require \"acquiescence\" by the branch of government whose prerogatives the practice implicates. Such acquiescence is commonly seen as critical for historical practice to have the force of law. Yet the concept of acquiescence has been treated much too casually in the literature. Claims about acquiescence are typically premised on a Madisonian conception of interbranch competition, pursuant to which Congress and the executive branch are each assumed to have the tools and the motivation to guard against encroachments on their authority. It has become apparent from political science scholarship, however, that the Madisonian model does not accurately reflect the dynamics of modern congressional-executive relations. This fact necessitates a reexamination of the premises and implications of the idea of institutional acquiescence in particular, and of the role of historical practice more generally. Ultimately, we argue, the problems with the Madisonian model are not fatal to crediting historical practice in interpreting the separation of powers. But they do require more attention to the reasons why such practice is invoked, the extent to which these reasons demand institutional acquiescence, and the precise method by which such acquiescence is identified. To illustrate the importance of each of these questions, we present three case studies of constitutional debates concerning the separation of powers in which practice-based arguments are prominent — war powers, congressional-executive agreements, and removal of executive officers.

Research on presidential power focuses almost exclusively on the modern era, while earlier presidents are said to have held office while congressional dominance was at its peak. In this article, I argue that nineteenth-century presidents wielded greater influence than commonly recognized due to their position as head of the executive branch. Using an original dataset on the county-level distribution of U.S. post offices from 1876 to 1896, I find consistent evidence that counties represented by a president’s copartisans in the U.S. House received substantially more post offices than other counties, and that these advantages were especially large under divided government and in electorally important states. These results are robust across model specifications and when examining the Senate. The findings challenge key components of the congressional dominance and modern presidency theses, and have important implications for scholarship on interbranch relations, bureaucratic politics, and American political development.

Apple's high-profile 2016 fight with the FBI, in which the company challenged a court order commanding it to help unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists, exemplifies how central the question of regulating government surveillance has become in U.S. politics and law. But scholarly attempts to answer this question have suffered from a serious omission. Scholars have ignored how government surveillance is checked by surveillance intermediaries: companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook that dominate digital communications and data storage and on whose cooperation government surveillance relies. This Article fills this gap in the scholarly literature, providing the first comprehensive analysis of how surveillance intermediaries constrain the surveillance executive, the law enforcement and foreign-intelligence agencies that conduct surveillance. In so doing, it enhances our conceptual understanding of, and thus our ability to improve, the institutional design of government surveillance. Surveillance intermediaries have financial and ideological incentives to resist government requests for user data. Their techniques of resistance are proceduralism and litigiousness that reject voluntary cooperation in favor of minimal compliance and aggressive litigation; technological unilateralism, in which companies design products and services to make surveillance harder; and policy mobilization that rallies legislative and public opinion against government surveillance. Surveillance intermediaries also enhance the surveillance separation of powers: They make the surveillance executive more subject to interbranch constraints from Congress and the courts and to intrabranch constraints from economic and foreign relations agencies as well as from the surveillance executive s own surveillance-limiting components. The normative implications of this descriptive account are important and crosscutting. Surveillance intermediaries can both improve and worsen the surveillancefrontier, the set of tradeoffs between public safety, privacy, and economic growth from which we choose surveillance policy. They enhance surveillance self government—the democratic supervision over surveillance policy—when they mobilize public opinion and strengthen the surveillance separation of powers. But they undermine it when their unilateral technological changes prevent the government from exercising its lawful surveillance authorities.